I think many folks in this this thread seem to believe in a platonic English language which doesn’t actually exist.
Let us take a step back. Clear your minds. Try to imagine a possible platonic English.
Now. English is the native tongue of the US, the UK, Canada (Quebec notwithstanding), Australia, New Zealand, and probably several other countries I haven’t the knowledge to name.
Which of these countries speak it correctly?
Which person speaks English more correctly, an Alabaman or a Welshman?
Which of these sentences is correct:
“Pink Floyd is reuniting for Live8.”
“Pink Floyd are reuniting for Live8.”
Consider the sport played with a round ball, with two teams of not more than eleven, in which most players may not touch the ball with their hands. What is its correct name?
None of these questions can be answered without reference to location, and by extension, inculcation (“that’s the way we say it here.”)
Language = platonic ideal
Dialect = language + location/inculcation
Anyway, that’s my likely half-baked two cents. This has been a lovely thread for the most part. Kudos to all involved.
Where did I say you were one? Where did I imply it? Right! Nowhere!
I’ve no problem with the children learning Standard English. That’s one of the reasons they’re in school. What I object to is a teacher telling the child that his family’s stupid or gutter based on their speech.
I tarred nobody with any bush. Please don’t read stuff I didn’t write into what I did actually write.
As a teacher, I also am teaching my students Standard American English and I love the children here too. Here, we don’t “dance around the issue” because our mission statement is explicit: the children are in our school to learn Standard American English.
I think one of the sticking points in this discussion has been the repeated use of the word “legitimize.” Magellan, more than anything else, says he doesn’t like the idea of legitimizing AAVE. I think this bears close scrutiny.
What is he getting at here? For AAVE to be legitimized by any action of a school, it must first be illegitimate. It’s an illegitimate dialect, in Magellan’s view, and he doesn’t want it to be made legitimate.
So, if it’s illegitimate, how so? Perhaps Magellan could explain this idea and why it’s important. How is AAVE illegitimate and why is it important that it remain so?
I have a lot of respect for teachers, especially ones who work with disadvantaged students. I don’t want to come across as trying to tell you how to do your job, but I think one of the best things that could come out of teachers and students learning the “rules” of AAE is helping the teachers understand when students are making a genuine mistake in reading and writing (ie, they really did think it said “I wants a toy” rather than “I want a toy.”) as opposed to when a different way of pronouncing things is to blame for the seeming mistake. Does that make sense?
Just as a sidenote, I never wanted to be in acadamia because I thought it was more or less useless and impractical. But I got over that when I saw that the type of linguistics I do can be used to do good things. Walt Wolfram calls this “linguistic gratuity,” which means when we go into a community to do field work and get data, we also try to do something good for them. For instance, some people use the tapes of stories what we gather to make CDs and booklets about the folklore or the history of the town, that the people in the town can sell; we make museum displays about dialects for local museum; we make documentaries for people. But, yeah…
What I meant (I think) was that standard English is put up as correct, and all other dialects are inferior in some way, either “lazy” or “sloppy.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a lingua francae as long as everyone understands that there is no “inherently superior” dialect, which you obviously do.
Here! here!
Oh, gosh, I hope I didn’t imply that I wanted onlt black kids to learn about dialects, because I again agree wholeheartedly.
Actually, infants learn more from their families since they don’t tend to have peers yet, but I swear to god we don’t learn langauge from TV, except for maybe some slang words and stuff; if you’re really dedicated, though, I would guess you can learn some stuff. You need to interact with someone to be able to truly pick up a language. Teachers can definitely have an influence, especially when it comes to second language acquisition, but most kids don’t pick up their teachers’ dialects (except in the case of my brother-in-law who picked up his teacher’s lisp because she told the kids to “talk just like her;” several years of speech therapy ensued). I need to find some studies about this online …
Going back to the question of “laziness.” Pronunciation changes over time. Are we lazy because we use the forms Arnold, Robert, Roger, Ronald instead of the “correct” forms in Old English, Earnweald, Hrodebert, Hrothgar, Regenweald?
However, I would like to point out that the “Slang Dialect” of my ancestors doesn’t appear as deviations of German words or Welsh words but distinct corruptions of English e.g. Hainna - usage Sophie is not looking well today, hainna? Translation - (roughly) Sophie is not looking well today, H’ain’t it? (Yes I realize that ‘ain’t’ is also improper slang)
And although my teachers never criticized our grandparents, my parents did. WE were taught to respect them and never correct them, but also never to emulate their speech, ( else we’d sound like boonyacs, and who would ever want to do that)
LOL, no I am not that old, although my receding hair line denies that.
BUt isn’t allowing improper speech to continue just as wrong. Ebonics as I understand it is mostly variations on English words. If I’m allowed to “AXE” you a question instead of “ASKING” you, then I submit the following variations that should be considered from my neighborhood.
Liberry - a good place to read a book
Chimley - the only place you’d want to see smoke coming out of your house.
boonyac - uneducated hick
Yes, I am being fascitious, and I could give you more examples, but I’ll let it go at that.
Unless I am missing something, …and I never discount that. It appears that Ebonics is just a street dialect derived from the English language.
Would those advocating teaching an understanding of Eboonics also feel that my friends and I should have been taught all about Liberries and Chimleys so that we could have done better in school?
Gregd1123, you have several different points in your post.
The difference between “ask” and “aks” is a regional pronunciation. It is similar to Bostonians saying that they drive a cah or buy things at the stoah or that the island south of Key West is named Cuber. I really doubt that there are many teachers in Boston correcting their students to say car, store, and Cuba. (And, if you missed it, it has already been noted, both earlier in this thread and in at least one of the links provided, earlier, that aks is not limited to AAVE; there are several groups of English speakers among white Americans and among Brits, themselves, who use that pronunciation. It is common in the white neighborhoods of one of the New York burroughs (I believe Queens, not sure) and it is common in several white ethnic enclaves in metro Pittsburgh.
“Sup” and similar expressions are slang. I would tend to expect that a teacher in a formal setting would ask that students use more formal expressions (for example, requiring that the student write in a term paper “Here is the information” rather than “Here the 411”).
I’m afraid that your Ebonics link is little more than a personal effort to compile the black, urban equivalent to “How to talk redneck” or “How to talk Minnesotan.” It contains a few slang terms and a few phonetic transcriptions of some of the words found in AAVE, but it does not address the issue of the structure of the dialect (and it is hardly comprehensive). Here is the overview (unfortunately in .pdf) of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) Grammar to which I linked earlier.
Regarding the teaching of liberries: Did you have any trouble understanding the word library when someone said it to you? Did you have any trouble understanding that liberry was simply a local pronunciation? If your grandparents said liberry and your parents switched between liberry and library depending on whether they were sitting at the kitchen table or attending a school meeting, you had the opportunity to see them employ code-switching. Contrast your understanding with that of a child who has spent the first five years of his or her life hearing and speaking “They gone” to mean “They are now gone” and “They be gone” to mean “They are always gone” when told to say “They are gone” if the teacher does not explain (or know to explain) whether “They are gone” means they are currently absent or they are always away.
Everyone participating in this thread has favored teaching the children to recognize and speak SAE. The question is what methods work best and what methods might be confusing and thus inhibit the learning process. One issue is how much exposure to successful code-switching some kids get. If they are in an area where code-switching is the norm, they are probably not going to have that much trouble. If they are from neighborhoods where they, themselves, are not exposed to code switching (as the Oakland school board supposed, rightly or wrongly, several years ago), they are going to have more trouble understanding what code-switching is and much more trouble employing it.
From the bulk of citations so far in this thread I think a more accurate description would be: Ebonics is a dialect of the English language that developed alongside Standard American English over the course of colonial and US history.
If that really was a common local dialect then yes. I would think your educators should a have a working knowledge of the dialect and its cultural origins. I would think that they should use that knowledge in the classroom whenever and however they find it appropriate, as long as the end result is that the students get a proficiency in SAE.
And to further hone the analogy, let’s suppose that there was a problem in your area with students resisting SAE instruction because of a percieved insult to thier culture and history. I would suggest a more nuanced approach than “here’s the right way and all other ways are wrong.”
Why not refine the curriculum a little bit to say “here’s the wrong way, here’s the SAE way, and here’s the Boonyonics way. Boonyonics isn’t necessarily WRONG, but you’re not getting out of this class until you learn the SAE way so let’s get to work.”
Who knows if it would help but I can’t imagine that it would hurt.
Good point. I believe both Magellan and Macguyver have now stated that teachers should never tell their students that their dialect is inferior. Sounds like “legitimization” to me.
Either the dialect is illegitmate (and therefore inferior) or it’s legitimate.
I guess there is a third possiblilty, basically that AAVE doesn’t exist at all. Then there would be no need to judge its legitimacy. I would say that the verdict is in and ignoring Ebonics is not really an option, but perhaps that is exactly what they propose. It’s the only way I can think of to reconcile “not inferior” and “not legitimate”.
P.S. Macguyver, thanks for your response, it cleared a lot up on my end. This is the only point of debate I saw that wouldn’t be a wild tangent.
tomndebb. " 'Sup" is slang? I dunno. I think it’s graduated past slang to a generational colloquialism – under thirty-five year olds into hip-hop use it. It’s been around at least a couple decades now.
No matter how it is dressed up, or no matter how many well thought and reasoned posts agrue for it; Ebonics is teaching children that is okay to not speak English properly. I put Ebonics up there with parents making cute baby names for common things. Like calling milk “cow juice”. I can imagine in a history class…the South did not get “smacked down” in the Civil War, they lost.
We are do our children a disservice when we teach down to them, when we should be trying to raise them up instead.
He goes thru great lengths to describe the process of (and propsed reason for) breaking down phrases and rebuilding them again that every language goes thru. For example, he takes you thru an explanation of the complicated declension system for Latin nouns, and shows how it arose by the very same process-- and how it really isn’t a complicated system at all if you understand where it came from.
I’m about half-way thru the book right now, and I’m very much enjoying it. One might say that “the book likes me.”
Emphasis added. Well, there we have it. It doesn’t matter how “well thought and reasoned” or linguistically and factually valid the arguments are that Ebonics/AAE is simply one of many English dialects. Some people will nevertheless continue to insist that instead it’s “debased”, “lazy”, “gutter slang of illiterates”, or the equivalent of infantile “cute baby names”. Because that’s what they want to think.
It’s not enough for those people that everyone agrees that we do have to teach children how to use correct standard English. Everyone agrees that Ebonics/AAE should not be given equal status as a standard/learned dialect… What they’re really objecting to is the mere concept that Ebonics/AAE is anything but sloppy, contemptible and inferior.
Racist culture has drummed it into us Americans for centuries that the verbal structures of AAE automatically indicate a laughably or contemptibly inferior person. And some people, even if they don’t subscribe to racist beliefs themselves, just have an incredibly hard time getting past that ingrained cultural assumption.
(Of course, a different kind of racist culture also drummed the same sort of thing into us about Irish English or Hiberno-English. For decades, speakers of that dialect were also automatically labeled as laughably or contemptibly inferior people. The effects in that case have been quicker to pass, though, and we no longer viscerally recoil from a phrase like “Sure, and 'tis herself coming down the street, so 'tis” the way we still do from one like “She never be comin down dis street no more.”)
Wow, everyone agreed? Really, everyone? We should mark this day down as the first time every single person thru 9 pages of posts agreed on the extact same thing!! wow oh wow! This shouldnt be in GD then should it? I mean, whats to debate if everyone agrees on the topic!? Well since everyone agreed, I guess my opinion is moot!! whoops on me!
I did read the previous pages, however, I still felt I wanted to say something, so I did. Hope that was okay?
Yup. Nobody here, as far as I can tell from my reading of all 9 pages of posts, most of them more than once, is seriously suggesting that we should not expect schoolchildren to learn standard English, or that we should replace it as a standard with AAE/Ebonics or any other dialect.
Well, obviously you haven’t read all nine pages of posts, or at least you haven’t understood them. The debate here is whether and why we should classify AAE/Ebonics linguistically as a dialect of English, and whether and how it should be used pedagogically to help schoolchildren learn standard English. Not whether it should be taught instead of standard English, which nobody here (or anywhere else, AFAICT) is suggesting.
